From TFA:
“Since cremations were common in the European parts of the Roman Empire around 100 AD [CE], inhumations are an absolute exception. Finds of Roman skeletons from this period are therefore extremely rare,” said Kristina Adler-Wölfl, head of the Vienna City Archaeology Department.
Which might tell a story in itself. This might have been a small detachment that was ambushed and utterly wiped out, leaving nobody alive on the Roman side to perform the traditional funeral rites. Instead the attackers were left to bury the bodies in their own tradition.
>This might have been a small detachment that was ambushed and utterly wiped out
or even three legions, 16,000–20,000 killed. "Teutoburg Forest is considered one of the most important defeats in Roman history, bringing the triumphant period of expansion under Augustus to an abrupt end. It dissuaded the Romans from pursuing the conquest of Germania, and so can be considered one of the most important events in European history."
“The numerals for 4 (IV) and 9 (IX) are written using subtractive notation, where the smaller symbol (I) is subtracted from the larger one (V, or X), thus avoiding the clumsier IIII and VIIII. Subtractive notation is also used for 40 (XL), 90 (XC), 400 (CD) and 900 (CM). These are the only subtractive forms in standard use.
[…]
While subtractive notation for 4, 40, and 400 (IV, XL, and CD) has been the usual form since Roman times [citation needed], additive notation to represent these numbers (IIII, XXXX, and CCCC) very frequently continued to be used, including in compound numbers like 24 (XXIIII), 74 (LXXIIII), and 490 (CCCCLXXXX).[12] The additive forms for 9, 90, and 900 (VIIII,[9] LXXXX, and DCCCC) have also been used, although less often“
Mind you, 0 needs inventing or what happens between 1 and -1 ... oh and -1 needs defining too, whatever that nonsense is!
People haven't somehow magically become cleverer over the recent millennia. We just have some fancier tools these days. I'm sure if you gave a few Romans enough wine and the starting point of "Quid CDI significat?" then you would probably get a decent discussion.
Often when the conversation of drinking comes up it becomes a contest to see who can drink the most. The WHO actually keeps track of this data on a population level[0]. Right now the country with the highest alcohol consumption per capita is Romania, with an average consumption of >2.9 units of alcohol a day for the entire population 15 years old or older. In case there is some national pride in your comment about Germany, rest assured they are 5th place. I'll leave the readers to decide if that is an enviable position.
Pliny the Elder described sugar, but he said that it was used only for medicinal purposes, presumably because having to be imported from India through Arabia it was available only in small quantities and at high prices.
However, besides the more expensive honey, boiled concentrated grape juice was widely used as a sweetener, for most purposes where today sugar would be used.
While some had indeed the very bad idea of using lead vessels for boiling the juice, both because lead vessels were cheaper and because that might have enhanced the sweetness, due to the taste of lead acetate, it is unlikely that this was a widespread practice.
Grape juice concentrated and sterilized by boiling has been used for millennia as the main sweetener instead of the more expensive honey, and in most cases the vessels used for boiling must have been made of healthier materials, e.g. bronze in the more ancient times, then cheaper brass during the Roman times.
In the warmer countries of the Middle East, boiled concentrated date juice was used instead of grape juice.
A simple DNA test should tell us. Roman soldiers were recruited from a diverse gene pool and fought far from their birthplace in mixed groups. A simple test to determine the average variance of genetics will let us know if they were a single ethnicity. Further cross references to compare similarity to other known genomes can tell us which region an individual was from.
Whole genetic sequencing cost about $500. So <$75,000 for the sequencing of the entire 150, plus scientist time to gather samples and process results. Answering the question through genetics probably costs more than $250,000 even with cheap grad student labor, so it's probably just not worth it, especially when the moral high ground is to let the dead rest.
Sequencing 2K years old material is not that easy, specially WGS. From what I've been told, both from degradation and contamination, you're going to need much, much more samples and work than when doing a regular $500 sequencing.
You can do simpler procedures to find their general regional origin, although it always requires more work in those conditions.
Edit: Wien Museum press release says they're doing DNA and isotope analysis, but doesn't say the concrete techniques applied.
DNA in the ground has a half-life of ~500 years. After 2000 years, ~6% of the DNA remains. More crucially, there will not be a single complete chromosome left, it's all a jumbled, mixed mess of DNA fragments.
This can be reconstructed, but it requires a much larger sample than normal DNA analysis. (You need to get enough fragments to get a whole genome, with enough overlap everywhere that you can reassemble the pieces.)
The largest problem after that is that the vast majority of DNA in all your samples will not be human DNA, but DNA of the various bacteria that live in the soil. This doesn't ruin the sample, because you can just reconstruct everything and then discard all the things that are not human chromosomes or mitochondrial DNA, but it does greatly increase the workload when compared to a pure human DNA sample.
There are a lot of smaller problems that I am eliding here. But amazingly, all the problems are solvable, and the progress in this field in just the past decade is staggering. We have usable fragments that teach us new things that are >500kyr old, the oldest complete human genome we now have is ~45kyr old, and more recent samples are solving hundred-years-old historical debates, and new ones are done almost daily. We are living in the golden age of archaeogenetics, and many papers published today on it will be cited for a hundred years or more.
... but all the solutions to those problems create a lot more work, and thus a lot more cost than those $500 gene sequencing kits.
Most likely They are not going to be allowed to rest at all. Especially western humanity is basically sanitizing the whole earth below them of human culture and history and storing it away in boxes and vaults, and ephemeral digital files of dubious quality, centralized for some Library of Alexandria or Dresden Bombing atrocity to totally erase all the centralized records of humanity.
No one seems to think of these types of things, especially in todays world where everything is digital and even in places like America there will be nothing left but rather uninteresting rubbish piles of plastic and other toxic remains left where stick and drywall houses and junky metal warehouses used to be.
There will be no silver lined sheathes of common soldiers, no coins of any kind, let alone gold ones, there will be no hidden manuscripts, not even charred scrolls that could be recovered with the use of AI. There will not even be any buildings and castles that stood the test of time for 1000 years, or any new pyramids because it rich and successful don’t build grand and permanent anythings. Humanity will effectively have not only left a huge hole in history starting in about the 1980s, but there won’t even be anything left to discover in the ground from the past the way we are going. And worst, even the digital history is clearly starting to come under attack with censorship and deletion and even the IP rules where corporations just get to delete what they dem you should no longer have.
Despite all that it has become much easier to copy vast quantities of information. A modest effort to archive by future generations could deliver far more than was previously possible through discovery of antiquities. And paper products are still produced in vast quantities.
TBH I agree that we Americans are going to leave behind some really lame plastic artifacts. But I’m trying not to worry about that sort of thing too much, it doesn’t seem healthy to worry too much about what’ll happen long after we’re dead. If we do, we might forget to live, right?
The Roman empire at this time made massive use of auxiliaries - ie not Romans. These are soldiers from conquered lands. Mercenaries were also used a lot. Mercs are soldiers for hire rather than hired soldiers!
Auxiliaries might be closer to slaves than soldiers and mercenaries might have fewer rights than auxiliaries. The devil is in the details. Auxiliaries might be granted Roman Citizenship at commencement or after a period of service.
In general the policy was to deploy aux. from the other end of the empire to augment your top troops in a particular war theatre. Mercs were used to top up if available - think of them as Uber or Lyft when you've run out of decent taxis 8)
Ideally you'd expend your aux and mercs carefully, to keep your real killers (heavy infantry) going. However its just not that simple, depending on what you (Roman General) had at your disposal in terms of troops. It also depended on you not being daft and throwing your cavalry up hill at pointy sticks or whatever. "Skirmishers" can also be devastating:
The Germans (have a look at my username - yes I'm English) german - might mean spearman (I was told this by a bloke from Bayern). They were skirmishers - no armour and a big pointy stick and a buckler shield. They brought low several Roman legions.
Anyway. The term Legionary is a tricky one. And so is German and quite a few other terms here.
I also wondered about the power extension reels, looks like two of them are the REV model shown here: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07KKQMVLW although one is a bit battered and the outer blue plate has fallen off.
Could be a variety of Henry: https://www.myhenry.com/ However it looks like the wheels in th piccie are outside the major plan view of the body, so perhaps not.
Romans usually burnt their corpses, so it is quite unusual to find skeletons.
From TFA: “Since cremations were common in the European parts of the Roman Empire around 100 AD [CE], inhumations are an absolute exception. Finds of Roman skeletons from this period are therefore extremely rare,” said Kristina Adler-Wölfl, head of the Vienna City Archaeology Department.
Which might tell a story in itself. This might have been a small detachment that was ambushed and utterly wiped out, leaving nobody alive on the Roman side to perform the traditional funeral rites. Instead the attackers were left to bury the bodies in their own tradition.
"Instead the attackers were left to bury the bodies in their own tradition."
Germanic tribes usually burned their bodies as well. But that does not mean, they feld oblieged to give the enemy a proper rite.
>This might have been a small detachment that was ambushed and utterly wiped out
or even three legions, 16,000–20,000 killed. "Teutoburg Forest is considered one of the most important defeats in Roman history, bringing the triumphant period of expansion under Augustus to an abrupt end. It dissuaded the Romans from pursuing the conquest of Germania, and so can be considered one of the most important events in European history."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest
To be fair, that’s pretty far from Vienna. Those seem to be separate incidents.
"The experts also noted remarkably good dental health."
The Roman army must have had good deductibles.
And CDI plans better than those in year MMXXV.
MMDCCLXXVIII AVC
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_urbe_condita
MMXXV is a legitimate usage of Roman numerals, but CDI is unauthorized
Certainly in modern use CDI is “a hundred less than five hundred, plus one”, or 401
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Standard_form:
“The numerals for 4 (IV) and 9 (IX) are written using subtractive notation, where the smaller symbol (I) is subtracted from the larger one (V, or X), thus avoiding the clumsier IIII and VIIII. Subtractive notation is also used for 40 (XL), 90 (XC), 400 (CD) and 900 (CM). These are the only subtractive forms in standard use.
[…]
While subtractive notation for 4, 40, and 400 (IV, XL, and CD) has been the usual form since Roman times [citation needed], additive notation to represent these numbers (IIII, XXXX, and CCCC) very frequently continued to be used, including in compound numbers like 24 (XXIIII), 74 (LXXIIII), and 490 (CCCCLXXXX).[12] The additive forms for 9, 90, and 900 (VIIII,[9] LXXXX, and DCCCC) have also been used, although less often“
-49?
Mind you, 0 needs inventing or what happens between 1 and -1 ... oh and -1 needs defining too, whatever that nonsense is!
People haven't somehow magically become cleverer over the recent millennia. We just have some fancier tools these days. I'm sure if you gave a few Romans enough wine and the starting point of "Quid CDI significat?" then you would probably get a decent discussion.
good selection of conscripts
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Too poor to afford sugar.
Actually bread was the most common issue for poor dental hygiene at this time.
Flour was ground by stone, tiny pieces of stone made its way into the bread, and the stone stripped the enamel from teeth.
So youre saying micro stones in the food supply were causing a public health crisis?
Underrated comment
And yes, this was a real thing.
ugh!
And still not as dangerous as adding sugar to everything
I wouldn't trade my diet for the diet of a roman. The estimated 500ml wine/daily is very high.
Less than a bottle/day. Not something I do but not something I wouldn't do either.
Roman wine was heavily diluted though, at least.
The 500ml is the undiluted amount [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Rome_and_wine
Yes maybe it is more like a pint of weak beer per day by modern alcohol standards. Not great for you but maybe a good source of clean water.
German breweries gave their workers an allowance of 4 to 8 liters of beer per day not too long ago. ('Haustrunk')
Often when the conversation of drinking comes up it becomes a contest to see who can drink the most. The WHO actually keeps track of this data on a population level[0]. Right now the country with the highest alcohol consumption per capita is Romania, with an average consumption of >2.9 units of alcohol a day for the entire population 15 years old or older. In case there is some national pride in your comment about Germany, rest assured they are 5th place. I'll leave the readers to decide if that is an enviable position.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_c...
> The estimated 500ml wine/daily is very high.
My dad and grandad would laugh at this. 500ml/day is rookie numbers in the former Roman parts of Eastern Europe.
Your dad might not be the best example of a healthy lifestyle.
Because they (and many other people) drank more than that, doesn't mean it's a good diet. The Romans drank they wine cut with water though I think.
Sugar (cane or refined) wasn't really a thing in the Roman period, even for those who could theoretically have afforded it.
Pliny the Elder described sugar, but he said that it was used only for medicinal purposes, presumably because having to be imported from India through Arabia it was available only in small quantities and at high prices.
However, besides the more expensive honey, boiled concentrated grape juice was widely used as a sweetener, for most purposes where today sugar would be used.
Oh wow, why did I think sugarcane is a New World crop? Apparently from Papua.
They had a very toxic replacement though, basically grape juice sirup rendered down in lead kettles.
While some had indeed the very bad idea of using lead vessels for boiling the juice, both because lead vessels were cheaper and because that might have enhanced the sweetness, due to the taste of lead acetate, it is unlikely that this was a widespread practice.
Grape juice concentrated and sterilized by boiling has been used for millennia as the main sweetener instead of the more expensive honey, and in most cases the vessels used for boiling must have been made of healthier materials, e.g. bronze in the more ancient times, then cheaper brass during the Roman times.
In the warmer countries of the Middle East, boiled concentrated date juice was used instead of grape juice.
Indeed, lead acetate is an artificial sweetener.
There are some funny questions in the comments: "So to be clear, they were Roman soldiers killed. Not locals?"
That caused me to re-read the article. Actually it is surprisingly ambiguous on that point inside the text of the article, with wording like
> the human remains likely belonged to soldiers who died during a battle involving ancient Roman legionaries.
Doesn’t say which side they were on. The most direct bit seems to be
> X-ray images of the sheath revealed typical ancient Roman decorations: silver wire inlays […]
But a German could just have traded with a Roman at some point.
Of course, the headline says they are Roman soldiers. I wonder if it is hard to tell definitively.
A simple DNA test should tell us. Roman soldiers were recruited from a diverse gene pool and fought far from their birthplace in mixed groups. A simple test to determine the average variance of genetics will let us know if they were a single ethnicity. Further cross references to compare similarity to other known genomes can tell us which region an individual was from.
Whole genetic sequencing cost about $500. So <$75,000 for the sequencing of the entire 150, plus scientist time to gather samples and process results. Answering the question through genetics probably costs more than $250,000 even with cheap grad student labor, so it's probably just not worth it, especially when the moral high ground is to let the dead rest.
Sequencing 2K years old material is not that easy, specially WGS. From what I've been told, both from degradation and contamination, you're going to need much, much more samples and work than when doing a regular $500 sequencing.
You can do simpler procedures to find their general regional origin, although it always requires more work in those conditions.
Edit: Wien Museum press release says they're doing DNA and isotope analysis, but doesn't say the concrete techniques applied.
Thanks for lifting me above the Dunning-Kruger threshold so that I understand there is more to archaeological genetics then I previously conceived of.
DNA in the ground has a half-life of ~500 years. After 2000 years, ~6% of the DNA remains. More crucially, there will not be a single complete chromosome left, it's all a jumbled, mixed mess of DNA fragments.
This can be reconstructed, but it requires a much larger sample than normal DNA analysis. (You need to get enough fragments to get a whole genome, with enough overlap everywhere that you can reassemble the pieces.)
The largest problem after that is that the vast majority of DNA in all your samples will not be human DNA, but DNA of the various bacteria that live in the soil. This doesn't ruin the sample, because you can just reconstruct everything and then discard all the things that are not human chromosomes or mitochondrial DNA, but it does greatly increase the workload when compared to a pure human DNA sample.
There are a lot of smaller problems that I am eliding here. But amazingly, all the problems are solvable, and the progress in this field in just the past decade is staggering. We have usable fragments that teach us new things that are >500kyr old, the oldest complete human genome we now have is ~45kyr old, and more recent samples are solving hundred-years-old historical debates, and new ones are done almost daily. We are living in the golden age of archaeogenetics, and many papers published today on it will be cited for a hundred years or more.
... but all the solutions to those problems create a lot more work, and thus a lot more cost than those $500 gene sequencing kits.
Most likely They are not going to be allowed to rest at all. Especially western humanity is basically sanitizing the whole earth below them of human culture and history and storing it away in boxes and vaults, and ephemeral digital files of dubious quality, centralized for some Library of Alexandria or Dresden Bombing atrocity to totally erase all the centralized records of humanity.
No one seems to think of these types of things, especially in todays world where everything is digital and even in places like America there will be nothing left but rather uninteresting rubbish piles of plastic and other toxic remains left where stick and drywall houses and junky metal warehouses used to be.
There will be no silver lined sheathes of common soldiers, no coins of any kind, let alone gold ones, there will be no hidden manuscripts, not even charred scrolls that could be recovered with the use of AI. There will not even be any buildings and castles that stood the test of time for 1000 years, or any new pyramids because it rich and successful don’t build grand and permanent anythings. Humanity will effectively have not only left a huge hole in history starting in about the 1980s, but there won’t even be anything left to discover in the ground from the past the way we are going. And worst, even the digital history is clearly starting to come under attack with censorship and deletion and even the IP rules where corporations just get to delete what they dem you should no longer have.
Despite all that it has become much easier to copy vast quantities of information. A modest effort to archive by future generations could deliver far more than was previously possible through discovery of antiquities. And paper products are still produced in vast quantities.
TBH I agree that we Americans are going to leave behind some really lame plastic artifacts. But I’m trying not to worry about that sort of thing too much, it doesn’t seem healthy to worry too much about what’ll happen long after we’re dead. If we do, we might forget to live, right?
Sir, this is a Wendys.
We are on the precipice of a new space age.
Where you should put your horizon is Psyche 16.
Space-factories building Starships for everyone. New iPhones dropping from the sky.
Earth, returned to Eden.
The Roman empire at this time made massive use of auxiliaries - ie not Romans. These are soldiers from conquered lands. Mercenaries were also used a lot. Mercs are soldiers for hire rather than hired soldiers!
Auxiliaries might be closer to slaves than soldiers and mercenaries might have fewer rights than auxiliaries. The devil is in the details. Auxiliaries might be granted Roman Citizenship at commencement or after a period of service.
In general the policy was to deploy aux. from the other end of the empire to augment your top troops in a particular war theatre. Mercs were used to top up if available - think of them as Uber or Lyft when you've run out of decent taxis 8)
Ideally you'd expend your aux and mercs carefully, to keep your real killers (heavy infantry) going. However its just not that simple, depending on what you (Roman General) had at your disposal in terms of troops. It also depended on you not being daft and throwing your cavalry up hill at pointy sticks or whatever. "Skirmishers" can also be devastating:
The Germans (have a look at my username - yes I'm English) german - might mean spearman (I was told this by a bloke from Bayern). They were skirmishers - no armour and a big pointy stick and a buckler shield. They brought low several Roman legions.
Anyway. The term Legionary is a tricky one. And so is German and quite a few other terms here.
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Can anyone tell me the manufacturer and model of the small, round vacuum cleaners in the photograph? You cannot believe how filthy my workshop gets.
I'm pretty sure it's this Einhell Wet/Dry Vacuum Cleaner: https://www.einhell.nl/en/p/2342370-tc-vc-1812-s/ this guy in England seemed quite happy with his: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyOu6TyEUuY
I also wondered about the power extension reels, looks like two of them are the REV model shown here: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07KKQMVLW although one is a bit battered and the outer blue plate has fallen off.
Have you looked at Shop-Vac? They make multiple sizes, the small wing being a cute 1 gallon (3.7 liters) desk version: https://www.shopvac.com/products/shop-vac%C2%AE-1-gallon-1-0...
Could be a variety of Henry: https://www.myhenry.com/ However it looks like the wheels in th piccie are outside the major plan view of the body, so perhaps not.
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